Literature and History.com

Hello and welcome to Literature and History, Episode 108, Isidore of Seville.

There are books in history that are famous and have been famous all along, like the Bible and the

Aeneid.

Then there are books that were obscure for long, long decades, only to be decreed masterpieces

later, like Moby Dick, and long before it, Beowulf.

But there is a third category of book, too.

Some books were stupendously popular for decades and even centuries, having entire traditions orbit around them and casting webs of influence far and wide, before later being largely forgotten.

Just so, some places and times in world history,

in between times that hinge different eras together,

and some cultures in world history, however influential they were for centuries,

after the medieval period and the Renaissance and

Enlightenment and deep into the centuries of modernity are just footnotes for us today.

Our story in this episode is about one of those books produced by one of those cultures.

This program is on the late antique bishop and scholar Isidore of

Seville and Isidore's Latin language encyclopedia, the etymologies. Isidore spent his life

and career in the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula in the kingdom of the Visigoths

during a formative period of history there.

As Visigothic Spanish kings slowly assumed control over the entirety of modern-day Spain,

devout members of the Catholic clergy there, including Isidore's family, worked hard to change Visigothic leadership from Aryanism to Roman Catholicism, and

in 589, they were successful. Isidore himself, however, isn't famous for steering the Visigoths

toward Orthodoxy. Today, we know Isidore as the author of about 24 books, the most famous of which,

...